And now for some digital painting! This is going to be part of a series of paintings that will illustrate some super short writing pieces of mine--eventually, once all the illustrations are done, I hope to consolidate it  all into a website, but presented in such a way that it's an "experience", like opening a book. This is technically not the first in the series, but taking the source photos for the first one was a huge pain and I only just got them done now.

Mr. Turtle was pretty challenging--perhaps not the turtle himself, but the room, the environment. It doesn't quite "pop" the way I want it to, so I'm hoping to get a critique or two and revisit it in a couple weeks.

Here's the process:

Oh, and some of you may be wondering "Whatever happened to that comic she was doing?" I haven't forgotten it. I hope to get back to that soon.

The final version "Rampion Rising" is now posted to the website--as always, I take a picture and announce it's done, and then a few weeks go by, I look at it again, and it's "Oh, wait--hold on." So, after a few more tweaks and corrections and then waiting several days for a sunny day, now the final picture is up on the website.

This time around, I'm going to varnish it instead of using a glaze. I've always glazed my paintings using a mixture of Galkyd watered down with Turpenoid, but after reading this, I noticed that a lot of the artists were doing varnishes. Previously, I thought of a glaze and a varnish as the same thing (a glossy translucent coating to bring out the saturation of a painting's colors), but apparently a varnish is a final coating that can be removed. A glaze cannot. I read a very a comprehensive PDF online by Gamblin about varnishing and their particular varnish, which is called Gamvar, and I decided I want to do varnishes from now on (I can't find the PDF to link to, so if you want it, email me and I'll send it to you).

This spurt of reading was brought about by my somewhat failed attempt to glaze Leviathan Queen--I apparently have to learn the hard way a few times before the lesson really sets in, so I think I must have glazed a bit too thickly and it didn't dry evenly (plus, it's also freaking huge, so that makes the job even trickier). This means that when the painting catches the light at certain angles, you can see a couple areas of glaze that stand out from rest of it. @#$%. So, I went ahead and tried to correct with a few more coats, but no go. The new layers are too thin to cover my mistakes--I would have to risk another thick layer and hope it dries properly. I'm not counting on that, so I'm considering varnishing it instead--worse comes to worse, I can remove the varnish. Plus, I noticed in the link above that the wondrous Donato Giancola used Galkyd as a glaze and then Gamvar on top.